Women in Fifties Britain

A New Look

Penny Tinkler, Stephanie Spencer, Claire Langhamer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367234317
• eBook ISBN: 9781351591171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Contented housewives, glamorous women, jive-mad teenagers – all are common figures in popular perceptions of 1950s Britain. But what more did it mean to be a girl or woman in the fifties? And what are the implications of this history for understanding post-war Britain?

Women in Fifties Britain explores the lived experience of girls and women, and the way in which their story has been told. Crossing boundaries – disciplinary, conceptual and thematic – and drawing creatively on new and established sources, it extends and enriches the terrain of women's history. Diverse groups of women come into view, including farmer's wives, university-educated women, activist housewives, working mothers, Jewish refugees, girls 'at risk' and private secretaries. Revealing that their private, public and professional lives were central to reshaping society, the collection engages with the legacy of World War II, and with questions about the distinctiveness of the 1950s. Embracing emotion, labour, gender, class, race, sociability, sexuality and much more, the authors offer penetrating exploration of established and new categories of historical analysis. Placing the politics of gender at the heart of Britain's reconstruction, this engaging and important collection re-visions 1950s Britain and the women that made it.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.

Teetering on the Edge: portraits of innocence, risk and young female sexualities in 1950s’ and 1960s’ British cinema

Janet Fink^a and Penny Tinkler^b

^aSEPD, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, UK; ^bSociology, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

ABSTRACT

This article explores how British social problem films in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented social anxieties around the sexuality of girls in their mid to late teens. Its analytic focus is upon the risks posed by modern social life to the teenage girl’s sexual innocence and it argues that attending to this hitherto often-neglected sexual state brings new insights to cultural histories of young female sexualities. Discussion draws upon Beat Girl (1959), Rag Doll (1960), Girl on Approval (1961) and Don’t Talk to Strange Men (1962), highlighting how these films situated the figure of the teenage girl in the liminal space of child-adult and girl-woman and how this informed concerns about her sexual vulnerability. By unpicking the films’ different approaches to viewing and representing this liminal space—through the lenses of adolescence and young womanhood—the authors demonstrate how at this historical juncture the intersections of gender and age are differently emphasised and given meaning in cinematic portrayals of sexual innocence.

… girls start off together, have the same chances. Some go straight, others go bad.’ (Beat Girl, 1959)

Introduction

In this article we consider how British cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s articulated and worked through anxieties about the gender and sexuality of girls in their mid to late teens. There have been wide-ranging studies of social problem films from this period and their portrayal and problematisation of young women’s sexual (im)morality, particularly around the issues of premarital sex and prostitution.¹ Our focus, however, is upon films which have been largely neglected in this research, thus moving beyond well-known ‘classics’ of the social problem film genre in order to examine films in which the teenage² girl’s nascent sexuality and adolescent immaturity dominate the narratives: Beat Girl (1959), Rag Doll (1960), Girl on Approval (1961) and Don’t Talk to Strange Men (1962).³ By identifying and analysing post-war British films which have not previously been brought together as resources through which to examine representations of the teenage girl, the article has three aims. The first is to explore how the figure of the sexually innocent teenage girl was represented in a period that was arguably on the cusp of a sexual revolution⁴ and the second is to consider the ways in which her innocence was understood and shown to be at risk because of her adolescent vulnerability and embodied young womanhood. Our third and overarching aim is to demonstrate that by focusing on sexual innocence, rather than transgressive sexual states, new terrain in the cultural histories of young female sexualities can be exposed and established.

This period is significant for such histories because of the increased numbers of 15–24-year-olds compared to a decade earlier,⁵ the heightened profile and commercialisation of youth culture⁶ and a preoccupation with sexuality.⁷ Here 1950s’ concerns about young people shifted from a focus on the delinquency of mainly working-class young men to concerns about the incidence of premarital sex, which brought the behaviour of young single women into the limelight.⁸ These concerns were reinforced by the new educational, employment and sexual horizons that were beginning to open up for young women⁹ and by the declining age of marriage, which complicated perceptions of what it meant to be a teenage girl.¹⁰ Cinema engaged equally with these debates about the seemingly changing nature of female sexuality, but as Geraghty suggests, it could do so in different ways from youth professionals and policy makers; with its important role in youth leisure and courtship practices, cinema had ‘much at stake in youth and its pleasures’.¹¹ Cinema sought to engage with its young audience as if it were an insider rather than a professional and adult outsider; this entailed an empathic narrative and visual representation of youth perspectives and desires that was exclusive to this media.

Our study enables us to reflect on the spaces social problem films created in modern Britain for exploring new articulations of young female sexuality in conjunction with concerns about the attendant risks to the teenage girl’s sexual innocence. It also opens up different approaches to analysing social problem films that have young female characters as their central concern. Hill and Landy, for example, focus on youth and point to the ambivalent use of the teenager in such films to represent the attractions and dangers of affluence, sexuality and the influence of the mass media.¹² Geraghty explores instead representations of care and social responsibility towards younger children and what these reveal about emerging understandings of their vulnerability and psychological well-being.¹³ Our discussion bridges these analytic foci by highlighting how the films examined here situate the teenage girl in a problematic liminal stage between childhood and adulthood, girlhood and womanhood. This entails addressing film not only in terms of narrative—the beginning, middle and end of a story. It also involves considering other interpretative possibilities afforded by how the story is conveyed through film, including pleasures in the image and the use of fashionable clothes, hairstyles, the female body, music, and pop stars to augment those pleasures.¹⁴

The article is organised in five parts. We begin by introducing the cinematic context in which the films that form the focus of our discussion were produced, and set out a brief synopsis of their respective storylines. Part two then examines the inherent riskiness of being a teenage girl, exploring how different risks to her sexual innocence are represented and the ways in which these are informed by and understood through the particular socio-cultural and demographic features of late 1950s’ and early 1960s’ Britain. Such features include girls’ increasing spatial mobility; the extended reach of predatory men as a result of new technologies; the growth of youth culture; the ‘failures’ of modern family life; and girls’ earlier physical and sexual maturation. From this we argue that the teenage girl in these films is situated in the liminal space between childhood and young adulthood and that the gendered significance of this space for portraits of sexual innocence and risk in 1950s’ and 1960s’ Britain can be interrogated through the films’ use of different lenses to portray the teenage girl: the emotional and psychological vulnerability of adolescence and embodied young womanhood. To exemplify our argument, the third and fourth parts of the article approach the films through these two lenses and draw out the different analytic insights they bring to our study. In the article’s final part, we return to the value of understanding the teenage girl’s liminality in portrayals of sexual innocence and risk in this period and how this focus opens up new dimensions in cultural histories of young female sexualities.

Cinematic context and the films

The films that form the focus of our discussion were made on the cusp of two very different socio-cultural historical periods which, as Peplar has identified, had ‘distinctively different images: the 1950s of Dixon of Dock Green, austerity, the coronation and the Festival of Britain; and the 1960s of permissiveness, representations of working-class life, women’s liberation and Swinging London’.¹⁵ In framing our argument about the use of images across these films and situating them clearly in the context of their production, we are thus attentive both to Conekin et al.’s argument that the story of modern (post-war) Britain is a ‘hybrid affair’¹⁶ and to the period’s structure of feeling in which there were many tensions between the period’s residual, dominant and emerging ideas and values.¹⁷Beat Girl, for example, portrays ‘modern’ life through images of Jennifer’s avant-garde home in which there is a stark absence of warmth and comfort in the design of the house and in the familial relationships being played out there. In comparison, the representation of Jean’s home in Don’t Talk to Strange Men, released some two years later in 1961, remains redolent of 1950s’ cosy domesticity, with its log fires, chintz furnishings and affectionate parent–child relations. However, neither of the teenagers’ homes or families is able to withstand what Harper and Porter identify as the disorder and irregularity of the modern public sphere.¹⁸ The films thus reinforce the unsettling experiences of post-war Britain.¹⁹ They show, for example, not only the excitement of youth culture in Beat Girl and the attraction of love and romance in Rag Doll, Don’t Talk to Strange Men and Girl on Approval, but also the fear and anxiety engendered in parents as they seek to protect their physically mature but emotionally naïve daughters—and their sexual innocence—from these powerful forces.

The films are ‘B-movies’. They were low budget and shown as support features for often more expensively produced mainstream films. Girl on Approval, for example, was screened in 1962 as a support feature for the acclaimed ‘New Wave’ British film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.²⁰ They are also products of independent film makers who were seeking to bypass what Harper and Porter identify as ‘the corporate financial and moral caution exercised by the industry’s major distributors’ and portray issues of contemporary relevance to audiences of late 1950s’ and early 1960s’ British cinema.²¹ In this, the film makers appear to have been successful with ‘28 out of the 37 most popular British movies between 1958 and 1952’ being independently produced.²² Moreover, their casts include well-known and respected actors with, for example, BAFTA award-winner and Oscar nominated Rachel Roberts appearing in Girl on Approval, and Christopher Lee in Beat Girl. This is not to say that stars attracted audiences to see a film; surveys of the period were unable to ‘separate a star’s appeal from the popularity of the film in which he, or she, appeared’.²³ However, the inclusion of high-profile pop stars like Adam Faith²⁴ and Jess Conrad, who feature in Beat Girl and Rag Doll respectively, suggests a deliberate targeting of young people²⁵ in order to increase the potential popularity of a film by exploiting the growing ‘cult of celebrity’ in 1950s’ Britain.²⁶

Such a strategy was crucial since cinema admissions generally had dropped from 755 million in 1958 to 501 million in 1960 as a result of the closure of cinemas across Britain as well as the emergence of an increasingly home-oriented culture in which the attraction of television was central.²⁷ But at the same time young people in employment dominated cinema audiences because of their spending power²⁸ and because dating experiences often included a visit to the cinema; for example, 51% of the adolescents in Michael Schofield’s study of sexual behaviour went to the cinema on a first date.²⁹ In such ways cinema became part of youth culture, reinforcing its presence by profiling pop stars and including sound tracks to films that were directed at the tastes of young people and their uses of pop music ‘to reinforce and unify a distinctive cultural identity’.³⁰

However, the films’ narratives also encompass the ‘problems’ of being a teenage girl and, as such, are part of the social problem film genre, in that, as Landy has claimed, they combine: ‘social analysis as dramatic conflict within a coherent narrative structure. Social content is transformed into dramatic events and movie narrative adapted to accommodate social issues as strong material through a particular set of movie conventions’.³¹ Social problem films of this period also had distinctive features of social realism, which, as Raymond Williams has argued, is committed to including or emphasising ‘hidden or underlying forces or movements’.³² For the films discussed here, a realist lens powerfully illustrates the extent to which y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Revisioning the History of Girls and Women in Britain in the Long 1950s
• 1. Teetering on the Edge: portraits of innocence, risk and young female sexualities in 1950s’ and 1960s’ British cinema
• 2. ‘Nothing gets her goat!’ The Farmer’s Wife and the Duality of Rural Femininity in the Young Farmers’ Club Movement in 1950s Britain
• 3. Women, Marriage and Paid Work in Post-war Britain
• 4. Taking Work Home: the private secretary and domestic identities in the long 1950s
• 5. Feelings, Women and Work in the Long 1950s
• 6. Cosmopolitan Sociability in the British and International Federations of University Women, 1945–1960
• 7. Special Relationships: mixed-race couples in post-war Britain and the United States
• 8. Belonging and ‘Unbelonging’: Jewish refugee and survivor women in 1950s Britain
• 9. What Do Women Want? Housewives’ Associations, Activism and Changing Representations of Women in the 1950s
• Index